Title: Bittersweet Realizations
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Disclaimer: Buffy tvs is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, I'm just borrowing them for the purposes of this story, some scenes / dialogue is from LMPTM with added scenes before, during and after the episode.
Spoilers: Set during season 7 episode "Lies My Parents Told Me"
Feedback: May be provided here or sent to aeryncrichton@hotmail.com
Subject: Additional scenes before, during and after "Lies My Parents Told Me" furthering the Buffy/Spike romance
Part IV - Ambushes & Delaying Tactics
A lucky punch from a fledgling vampire sent Buffy reeling. Then as she stepped backwards, she tripped over a low headstone and found herself sprawled on the ground. She arched her back and popped back up to her feet, dealing the fledgling a couple of quick hits that landed him on the ground.
Giles had accompanied her to St. Timothy's Cemetery, when she'd met up with him at The Magic Shop.
"I don't know Giles. Is this really a primo time for a training session?" Buffy asked, shrugging her shoulders and turning to face her Watcher. The man she'd come to treat as a stand in for her missing father. He'd taught her so much, been with her through so many ordeals and trials. And yet, this call to discuss strategy and work on her slaying technique seemed a bit forced and awkward even. Maybe, because Giles had taken to spending more time with the trainees than he did with her.
"I'm still your teacher Buffy. And as adept as you are as a Slayer there will always be things to learn," Giles pointed out quite logically. "Now more than ever, its crucial to maintain focus on your calling," he said, running a nervous hand through his hair, then crossing his arms to prevent any more careless gestures.
"In case you haven't noticed our plates are kind of full right now," Buffy commented bleakly. Then she added in a soft tone, knowing that it probably wouldn't move Giles, "I'm not very comfortable having Spike over at Wood's house either. I don't understand why he couldn't come with us."
Giles kept his lips compressed, not daring to voice what he really thought, that Buffy had been spending entirely too much time with Spike as it was. Watching them spend more time together was not going to improve the situation. Giles shook his head, despising the deception he felt he'd been forced into by Buffy's own stubborn refusal to see how truly dangerous Spike was, to her, to her friends and to the Slayers in training living in her house.
"For what it's worth, everyone at your house seemed quite relieved with the arrangement," Giles pointed out quite calmly. Going behind Buffy's back didn't set well with him. He knew it could lead to bad things. It had in the past. Maybe he should just... but no. He and Robin had agreed and it was for the best. Buffy needed to be kept as far away from Spike as possible. "Buffy, even though I'm not your Watcher anymore, there is never a day that I don't think about you and worry about your survival. That was true even when I was back home in England, perhaps even more so than when I was here. The extreme uncertainty in your life simply underscores just how important the lessons I can still impart are."
Buffy shrugged her shoulders, unable to come up with a reasonable argument to Giles emotion laden speech. "Fine. Impart away."
"We're on the verge of war," Giles began in his lecturing tone. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "It's time you look at the big picture."
"Hello. All I do is look at the big picture. The other day I gave an inspirational speech to the telephone repairman," Buffy joked with deadpan seriousness.
"It takes more than rousing speeches to lead Buffy. If you're gonna be a general, you need to be able to make difficult decisions regardless of the cost," Giles told her.
"Have you seen me with those girls?" Buffy asked, trying to get Giles to acknowledge that she'd been spending plenty of time training the potential Slayers. "I mean, the way I've treated my friends and my family and even Andrew." Buffy looked back at the way she'd been forced to use her friends in this fight, even though they were willing it scared her to think of them getting hurt or even killed in this war. It was tough to think that protecting their lives had to be a secondary consideration in the fight she was in. "Believe me, I know how to make hard decisions."
"Well, that's what we're here to find out while we work on the basics," Giles informed Buffy stiffly. He continued to ponder the choices he'd made and the one currently playing out at Robin Wood's house right now. Hope was a fragile thread to hang such plans on, but it was all he had.
Back at Wood's House
Robin Wood led Spike to the barn-like structure that stood beside his house. It was unattached and there was a padlock on the door, which Wood took out a key to unlock.
"You live in the garage?" Spike asked, curious despite himself about where he was being led.
Wood looked over his shoulder at Spike and replied, "it's more of a workroom. Kind of a sanctuary."
Spike nodded. "A little place to unwind huh?" Spike walks into the dark space and continues to speak his thoughts aloud, "hard day in the Principal's Office gets you a little down you need a place to cut loose, let your hair down, so to speak." In the meantime, Wood flicks the switch on, bathing the cross covered room bright light. "What the bloody hell is this?" Spike questioned. As his gaze panned over the room, all he saw was large crosses, small crosses, wooden crosses, metal crosses. There were crosses of every bloody description covering just about every square inch of the walls and even the backside of the door.
"I told you. This is my sanctuary. It's the Hellmouth, Spike. You can never be too careful. Just stay away from the walls and you'll be all right," Wood cautioned as he closed and locked the door behind them.
"It's a bit much, isn't it?" Spike asked, as he glanced about the room, surveying the excessive amount of crosses nailed to the walls. It was a bit of a nightmare scenario for any vampire to be trapped in a room like this. Spike had never felt entirely comfortable around Wood, but then there weren't a whole lot of people that didn't get a bit twitchy once they knew you were a vampire.
Wood kept one eye on Spike, while he made his way over the PC. He turned it on and waited for it to boot up.
Taking the initiative seemed his only option, since Wood was strangely silent. Spike offered up another, more probing question, "What's your story Wood?"
"No story really, just trying to do what's right," Wood answered. "Make a difference," he continued, as if what was going on had anything to do with the current fight, rather than being rooted in his own history. "How about you? What kind of man are you Spike?"
Spike shook his head. "Sorry, not much for self-reflection." That was especially true when it came to discussing himself with this prat.
"Yeah, makes sense," Wood agreed. He clicked on an icon in the computer, pulling up the file he needed. "See, you strike me as the kind of guy who just careens through life, completely oblivious to the damage he's doing to everyone around him."
"That right?" Spike asked rhetorically.
"I know more about you than you think Spike. See, I've been searching for you for a very long time. Ever since you killed my mother," Wood informed him. The time for his revenge had finally arrived and he was determined to savor every moment.
"I killed a lot of people's mother," Spike admitted dryly. What he'd done before he had gone and earned himself a soul, when he'd been solely a demon possessed vampire, wasn't something he factored into his bouts of guilt and remorse much. There wasn't much he could do about it. What's done is done and all that rot.
"Yeah, you'd remember mine," Wood spit out. "She was a Slayer." No ordinary woman indeed and no ordinary kill, for any vampire, even Spike.
"So that's it, isn't it? You brought me here to kill me?" Spike asked.
"No, I don't want to kill you Spike. I want to kill the monster that took my mother away from me." Wood clicked the icon that turned on the song that Spike had told them all in Buffy's basement was the trigger that The First had planted in his brain to unleash his demon on any unsuspecting human. The demon that inhabited William's body took over, his brow and forehead morphed to the bumpy state and his fangs lengthened. "There he is."
Spike, in his vampire guise, fought with Wood. Spike's unrestrained vampire rage and bloodlust made him a formidable opponent indeed. But Wood's need for revenge for the untimely death of his mother turned him into a berserker.
Meanwhile, Spike descended into a world of the mind, as memory swept through him like a cleansing wind.
A newly transformed Spike walked into his former home.
"Mother?" he called out his query.
"Hello William," his mother answered.
"Look at you," the newly transformed vampire Spike marveled at the change in his mother.
"Hm, yes," she murmured. "All better," she observed.
"You're glowing," he observed.
"Am I?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, still caught up in the marvel of her standing, unbent by the wracking cough that had plagued her these last few years.
"Well, I suppose I have you to thank for that, don't I?" she asked rhetorically. "However will I repay you?" she asked.
"Seeing you like this is payment enough," Spike replied.
"Oh William. You're so tender," his demon possessed, new made vampire mother observed.
"This is as it should be mother. You and I together. All of London at our feet," Spike replied, not catching the obvious sarcasm in her tone, or the evil glint in her eye.
"Ah yes, us," she observed coolly.
"First we'll feast. Then the night is yours. The theatre perhaps? Dancing? Tell me, what's your pleasure?" Spike asked, full of loving concern.
"Pleasure?" she bit out sarcastically. "To take my leave from you, of course. The lark had spake from twixt its wee beak. You honestly thought I could bear an eternity listening to that twaddle?" she asked.
After twisting the knife in Spike's gut with ridicule, she leaned in to finish him off. He finally realized that the woman beside him was no longer his mother, and reaching down, he picked up a sharp stick from the woodpile near the fireplace and shoved it through her heart, turning her to dust.
Spike shook off his vampire face once he pulled out of his trigger induced flashback.
Where unchecked vampire strength had been unable to defeat Wood, Spike's rational, souled, conscious self was able to beat him into the ground within minutes.
When he leaned down over Wood, Spike taunted, "I just want you to know that the trigger is gone. Nice job that. I just wanted you to know before I did this." With his vamp face once more in place, Spike tore into the flesh of Wood's neck with his fangs.
When Spike pulled back, Wood was weak, but still alive.
Spike picked up the black leather coat that Wood had appropriated from him earlier, slipped his arms through it and walked out the door.
St. Timothy's Cemetery
Buffy continued to fight the vampire that she could have easily dusted as soon as he crawled out of his grave. Listening with only half an ear to Giles' instructions.
"Buffy are you listening to me?" Giles finally asked.
"Huh?" Buffy breathed, before really considering what he might have asked.
"Pay attention, please," Giles requested. "There will be times when difficult decisions will have to be made. Sacrifices will be necessary..." he began.
"Sacrifices?" Buffy repeated. At first she didn't want to believe he could mean when he did, but when she saw the guilty look on Giles' face she knew exactly what kind of sacrifice he was talking about.
"This was all just a delaying tactic. To keep me away from Spike," she deduced.
She dusted the vampire she'd been sparring with and started to run. "What have you done to him?" she yelled. Her earlier worry over Spike's well being in Wood's care came back to haunt her with a prescient quality.
"Only what was necessary. What you couldn't or wouldn't do..." Giles admitted.
Outside Wood's garage
Buffy slowed from her headlong run to a walk, as she saw Spike emerge from Wood's garage.
"Spike, what happened?" Buffy asked, a frown between her brows.
Instead of providing an answer, Spike opened the door to Wood's garage, so Buffy could see Wood leaning weakly against the wall of the cross-decorated interior, bloody and beaten, a ragged bite wound on his neck.
"Oh my God," Buffy exclaimed.
"I gave him a pass, let him live on account of the fact that I killed his mother. But that's all he gets," Spike told her, as he turned and began walking away. He stopped and looked back, to find Buffy still watching him. "He so much as looks at me funny again, I'll kill him."
Spike once more turned and walked away, with a calm, self-assured swagger that had been missing from his stride for quite some time.
Buffy breathed in and out, then she walked inside to where Wood remained on the floor. She got an arm around him and helped him rise to his feet.
"I lost my mom a couple years ago. I came home and I found her dead on the couch," Buffy told Wood in a conversational tone. Simply the thought of finding her mother's body was enough to leaver her throat tight, but she managed to clamp down on those reactions. She had to, in order to say anything to him at all, a counterpoint of rage holding her at the ragged edge of her control.
"I'm sorry," Wood replied. He felt a bit woozy from the blows and the blood loss, so he wasn't quite sure if Buffy was trying to make a point and he was just missing it.
"Not what I was getting at." Buffy shook her head. The she continued, "I understand what you were trying to do, but your mom's dead."
"Because he murdered her," Wood pointed out bleakly. Nothing would bring her back, but it didn't seem right that her murderer was still alive after all these years. He'd had more than one chance to kill Spike, but he hadn't been able to pull it off. And now he probably would never have another chance.
"I'm preparing to fight a war and you're looking for revenge on a man who doesn't exist anymore," Buffy stated in a calm, rational tone.
"Buffy, don't delude yourself, that man still exists," Wood insisted.
"Spike is the strongest warrior we have," she stated. "And we are going to need him if we're gonna come out of this thing alive. You try anything with him again and he'll kill you... more importantly, I'll let him," she warned. Wood met her cool stare. "I have a mission. To win this war. To save the world. I don't have time for vendettas. The mission is what matters."
Wood could hear the echo of his mother's voice in Buffy's words, but it brought him only cold comfort.
Summer's house
Buffy looked into Dawn's room. She walked into her sister's room, checked to make sure the bandage on her head is clean and tucked the covers around her. Then she walked back into the hallway, to find Giles lurking... waiting for her.
"Buffy, I... I understand your anger. Please believe me, we... we did what we..." Giles began his weak explanation, sure in the knowledge that Buffy would be most upset at being unable to save Spike, who was a danger to them all with the trigger in his brain.
"He's alive Giles. Spike's alive," Buffy informed him. "Wood failed in his mission, a mission both of you failed to inform me about." Her voice contained chill censure, biting and as cruel as their mission to rid her of Spike had been.
"Well, that doesn't change anything. What I told you, is still true. You need to learn..." Giles began again in an instructional tone.
"No, I think you've taught me everything I need to know," Buffy informed Giles, as she shut the door to her room in his face.
"You've taught me more than enough," she muttered under her breath, to herself.
Buffy opened her bedroom window and climbed down the tree beside it. It almost seemed like she'd gone back in time, to the days when her mother was alive. It had seemed so complicated then, but looking back it seemed simpler somehow when she'd simply snuck out of the house every night to patrol, before she admitted to her mother that she was The Slayer and everything went completely to Hell. In a roundabout way that brought her thoughts right back to Spike.
There was no way she'd be able to sleep until she saw him, talked to him, so she started walking toward the Riverside Cemetery. With a dozen cemeteries to choose from, Buffy figured she had her work cut out for her. Spike was sure to be keyed up and he might just be looking to fight a few of the monsters to let off some steam.
A blow to her back sent Buffy to her to her knees so fast she barely had time to look up to see a fist flying at her face.
To be continued...
The next part should wrap up this story, so please let me know what you think; all feedback is very welcome and very much appreciated.
